Sing Me A Song

As a kid, I was told not to sing. I was told I didn’t have the talent, my voice doesn’t sound good. That just isn’t something you can do. Your brain doesn’t work that way. My mother, who is a talented singer with a very good degree in music made it very clear I would always stand in this shadow. Music kept calling me, but I never called it back, messages piling up on my answering machine. Eventually the line was disconnected and I stopped listening to the music all together. I convinced myself it was a natural fade out, an expired relationship.

Then my son was born. His first year was a struggle. He was so skinny and the round the clock milk seemed to just vanish from his body. We spent so many nights together, drowning in the ocean of his cries. The months wore on and we sank farther and farther down. Our feet hit the bottom of a barren world and my lungs filled up, not with water but with song.

I sang to my son that night. It was not a perfect song, or even a technically good one. My voice was quiet and shy from living down there all those years. I definitely still sat in the shadow of my mom’s talent. But it was sincere and my own. My son slept and the song became his too. I, however, had just woken up.

I’ve learned many things in the course of becoming myself through parenthood. Some of them were easy lessons, others harder. The deepest lesson I’ve learned I found long with my voice at the bottom of the ocean, covered in coral and half buried in sand. I learned not that things aren’t always what they seem, but that nothing is only what it seems to be.